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Brain Dish is the description of an experiment at Florida University. 25'000 brain cells from a rat brain, “living” in a Petri dish are hooked up to a flight simulator and “learn” to fly a F-22 jet. In a way, I’m thrilled by this. I have been working with neural networks in the financial world and we have quite some experience with what neural networks can accomplish. That a organic neural network can master flight is somehow the logical conclusion and somewhat expected. ...

Today it hit me - a memory from a life long past, from music bizare: Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick In the deserts of Sudan And the gardens of Japan From Milan to Yucatán Every woman, every man Hit me with your rhythm stick Hit me! Hit me! Je t’adore, ich liebe dich Hit me! Hit me! Hit me! Hit me with your rhythm stick Hit me slowly, hit me quick Hit me! Hit me! Hit me! ...

Ich habe zumindest den Schluss gesehen. Die Idee habe ich von Don Dahlmann geklaut (der sie auch geklaut hat) (und das ist ja auch ok). So lustig wie Don kann ich nicht, trotzdem: Hier ist sie: Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel - Der Herr der Ringe Ja - zweimal komplett. In Englisch (natürlich). Nachdem wir in der Schule “Der kleine Hobbit” gelesen hatten (damals war ich jünger als 12, weil es in Dänemark gelesen wurde). Also hab ich mich irgendwann zwischen 12 und 16 zweimal durch Mittelerde gekämpft. Und es geliebt (ausser den ausschweifenden Genealogischen Abhandlungen). Die Filme waren auch gut. ...

choppy. And blocky. And something you will hear a lot about (at least in Switzerland) in about three weeks (in time for the holiday spending season). Yes - the technology is neat. Yes - it works. No - I don’t think it’s going to be the big hit, the marketing people think it will be. But I could be wrong. What it is? I’ll tell you, when the time has come. Hints: Small, wireless. ...

R. stumbled upon Jeftel that promises (among other things) an end to Spam. They do it by using a proprietary, peer-2-peer email system. That’s great news actually, beacuse it shows us, that we haven’t been the only ones having this idea. (And as Simon Garfinkel notes, P2P comes clean and can be used for other purposes than sharing music). So how does it compare to what we at ZAPPATA are doing. I have outlined how ZAPPATA solves email problems (not just Spam). And we don’t do anything proprietary either: We use known and trusted protocols: SMTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS. ...

I returned from a long weekend (or rather, a very short vaccation) from the south of France, left the family behind to do some more vaccationing and resumed the task of earning money (as every caring family father should do). It was difficult at best to get back. We had a wonderful lunch in La table d’Emilie (13 points Gault Millaut) and even the kids got their share of Foie Gras and other good stuff. They managed to sit through almost 2 hours of lunch and really enjoyed the food (well, most of it). Highly recommended (and for Euro 90 for the four of us with complete menus each, not expensive at all) ...